24 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



I was impressed a few years ago in traveling through the 

 south and central parts of Illinois with the abundance of corn 

 and other grain crops that you are producing, and I apprehend 

 that during the past few years you have been confronted with 

 the same conditions that have made those years unprofitable 

 ones to the Iowa farmer. The freight agent of one of our lead- 

 ing lines of railroad told me last spring that they had at 

 that time eighty million bushels of corn cribbed up on 

 their line of road in our state, and not a bushel of that corn 

 could be moved at a profit to the producer or the railroad either. 

 Where we have as productive a soil and as favoroble conditions 

 as we have in Iowa and you have in Illinois, the tendency is to 

 overdo the production of grain crops, and I want to urge that 

 you make more use of the dairy cow in marketing these products. 

 I notice that you are producing very largely of wheat, and wheat 

 during the past five or six months has been a profitable crop, 

 but your soil will not always go on producing wheat. Has it 

 ever occurred to you that in sending to market one thousand 

 dollars' worth of wheat at the ordinary price that you are taking 

 from your farm three to four hundred dollars' worth of fertility, 

 or what it would take three to four hundred dollars' worth of 

 commercial fertilizers to replace if you were obliged to pay out 

 money for them. Of course I recognise that you are not obliged 

 to buy commercial fertilizers, but notwithstanding 'that, your soil 

 will not go on producing wheat indefinitely. 



On the other hand, you can produce and send to market one 

 thousand dollars' worth of cheese and take from your farm only 

 eighty-five dollars' worth of material that is of any value as a 

 fertilizer. You can produce and send to market one thousand 

 dollars' worth of butter and not take one dollars' worth of 

 fertility from yaur farm. These are facts which we need to con- 

 sider in governing our production. We must remember, too, 

 that though there are times when grain will sell well enough to 

 return a good profit, that is only for a very short period. This 

 immense amount of grain, of which I speak, that was stored in 

 in our state, had a possible market of forty to fifty cents a bushel 

 when fed to good dairy cows or good stock of any kind. There 



